In Robert Greene’s the 48 Laws of Power, his first law is ‘Never Outshine the Master.’
His example uses a 17th century French king, Louis XIV, and his finance minister Nicolas Fouquet who upstaged him. Fouquet ended up spending his remaining days in a mountainous, freezing prison in the Pyrenees. (Wikipedia tells a slightly different reason to Greene’s version, suggesting Fouquet’s networking and influence in society was a more aggravating factor. But hey, maybe that outshone the King too.)
I’ve got a slightly more contemporary example. Some time at the end of the 2000s, I was training in a Mixed Martial Arts gym in Oldham. The instructor DB was known to be good at what he taught – his fighters usually won, and his lessons were packed with solid advice. If it transpired that DB didn’t know a specific thing, he’d go and look it up and incorporate it. We were drilling chokes in one session, and I used the word ‘trachea’ instead of ‘windpipe,’ off the cuff, and I seemed to be the only person in the room who knew the word. He started using the word during choke lessons not long after this.
There was a kid training there who probably wasn’t even 18 yet. He’d apparently had a period of absence, and then rocked up one day at training with a largely unnecessary written note as to why he’d been off. This got him the nickname ‘Sicknote.’ He was young mentally too, and not particularly confident when he spoke, but when he did pipe up had a habit of doing so at the wrong moment.
During an explanation of a particular move, Sicknote contradicted DB in front of the class.
“Do you want to take over?” DB sarcastically asked him, pointing to a space in the mats.
Sicknote did not.
He was apparently training in MMA elsewhere as well. I was a similar height and build, so at DB’s gym I paired with him a couple of times. Twice, he changed up the movement that we were drilling to some other movement he'd learned elsewhere, which first off is a ballache when you have memory difficulties. It’s hard enough just learning one thing, without throwing in something else in the same round. More to the point, it’s rude. If you’re paying someone to teach you to do something, just do what they tell you to. They’re a martial arts INSTRUCTOR, not an ADVISOR.
The second time this happened, DB pulled him up on it. Sicknote protested, claiming he was doing nothing wrong. DB went to the cash register, gave him his class fee back, and told him to leave the gym. Sicknote was gobsmacked, but complied. We never saw him again.
The upshot: if they’re in charge, let them be in charge. Transgress this at your peril.
